


SGU EU 2

by Deacon_Heller



Series: Stargate Universe EU C137 [2]
Category: Stargate - All Media Types, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27124772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deacon_Heller/pseuds/Deacon_Heller
Summary: Destiny is boarded by a probe of unknown origin and Eli struggles to deal with it before discovering it's secret.
Series: Stargate Universe EU C137 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965601
Kudos: 3





	SGU EU 2

Eli stood on the bridge aiming his rifle at a floating orb approximately two feet wide hovering silently just above the captains chair. 

"...ve. Alive, is what I was saying. Felt like it took a week to finish that sentence," Eli mumbled as he stared at the orb. It was featureless and a silver so polished it was almost a perfect mirror. Without moving Eli glanced around the bridge to see if there was anything else he'd missed walking into the bridge. He threw a side glance at Wilson. "Friend of yours?"

Eli watched it for several seconds, but it didn't move. He wondered if it was a part of the ship that he'd never read about before or if it was something alien that had boarded them. After a moment he slowly slid one foot forward and then the other. When he was close enough he poked the orb with the barrel of his rifle and then jumped back. The surface of the ball rippled where the barrel touched it, but otherwise it didn't move. 

Eli darted out of the bridge and returned a moment later to toss a kino through the hatch like a grenade and then quickly shut it again. After he locked the hatch he stepped back and watched through the screen on the remote as the kino floated towards the orb. 

He glanced at Wilson. "I couldn't throw you in there, buddy. It might be dangerous."

Wilson floated silently beside him.

"Whatever it is we can't just let it take control of the ship."

Eli turned and walked from the bridge to the Control Hub and began diverting control from the bridge. Once he was sure he locked out every system he could, Eli went back to the bridge hatch to see if the orb had responded. He watched through the screen on the remote, but it remained motionless over the captains chair. Eli activated the kino and began scanning the orb. 

"What the hell? Maybe I should have put you in there," Eli said to Wilson. "You're brother isn't getting any readings on the orb. No heat, no EMF, no mass displacement, and just a nearly invisible round blur on video. What the hell is that thing?" 

Wilson followed Eli back to the Control Hub where he began examining the ships internal sensors. "Destiny can't see it either."

Eli checked the ships sensor logs. No other ships approached Destiny, and none of the airlocks were opened. Next Eli checked the gate logs and saw that the gate activated over an hour before he returned with the shuttle. Next he checked the ships activity logs, and while the orb was almost invisible to the ships sensors it did log the opening and closing of hatches which gave him a path directly from the gate to the bridge. 

He went over the ships' systems once more to double check that they were as secure as possible. He stepped back from the console and ran his fingers through his long hair. "Absolutely nothing for months, and in one day I almost die and we get boarded by a giant alien ball bearing."

Eli looked up at Wilson. "I don't know about you, but I need a shower...and some new underwear."

Eli's near life experience and the intruder in the captains chair made him rethink leaving the ship any time soon. He dragged a chair to the Control Hub and split his time between checking on the orb, trying to Reach Ginn, and cleaning out gummed up life support filters. By day five Eli was seriously considering the orb may just be an hallucination. 

He stood outside the hatch to the bridge with the remote in his left hand and a pistol in his right. He stood like this for an hour before he slapped the control with the butt of the pistol and walked into the bridge. Eli aimed the pistol at the orb. He stepped right up to it and looked at himself in its mirror finish. He wasn't sure if he should shoot the orb or himself. 

He exhaled as his arm dropped. He rubbed an eye with the back of his left wrist and looked back up at the kino floating silently beside the orb. He looked at the remote to check the readings one more time. Eli put the pistol in his waist band and looked back at the remote, seeing a glitch he'd never noticed before. 

Eli stood there for several minutes trying to figure out the glitch and correct it by fine tuning the video frequency. When he thought it was fixed he switched to the live feed from the kino beside him, but it seemed off, somehow. It took him a second before he realized why. He was facing the kino but he was getting a profile image of himself. He waved his hand in front of the kino, but it didn't appear on the screen.

Eli looked at the orb and down to the screen on the remote. He turned to face the orb and held the remote up beside him like a phone. He was looking at himself through the orb instead of the kino. He leaned to the left and then the right, and then he slowly walked in a circle around the chair. Outwardly he couldn't tell if the orb was rotating but it tracked him in all the way around the chair. 

Now that he had the right frequency for the orb he tried using the remote to access other functions. When he went to the menu there were several additional options that never appeared for the ships kinos. He tried to access one but it didn't work. Then he noticed they were lit in a different color from the standard features of a remote, and Eli concluded that meant that he couldn't operate them from this model of remote. 

Eli went into the orbs' recorded video and navigated the slightly different menu until he accessed the footage. He started it from the present moment and went backwards, speeding up the footage up until the orb arrived and made its way from the gate to the bridge. Eli tried three times but he couldn't access any footage prior to the orb emerging through the gate. 

"That's annoyingly unhelpful," Eli mumbled. He glanced up to Wilson. "Well, it seems like it's Ancient technology, so where did it come from? Wait, who did it come from?"

Eli scrolled through the orbs menu again to see if there was any clue who sent it, but there was nothing in any of the directories to indicate it was from a living, breathing, Ancient Alterans. 

"Do you think they're finally coming back for the ship?" Eli asked Wilson. "That would be so helpful."

"Let's bring them up to speed," Eli used the remote to get back to the recording screen. 

"Hi, I'm Eli," He waved his hand at the orb. "Crap, this is in English. Ok, sorry, I don't speak Ancient, or, what do you call it...Alteran," Eli muttered. "Well, you're advanced, you'll figure it out. Anyway. How do I explain this? I'm from Earth, you guys probably had a different name for it, but you've been there. Whatever, we found the gate, and we found this ship, and long story short, we had to board the ship...because the planet was about to explode. Actually, it did explode, but that wasn't our fault."

"Uh, moving on. So anyway, we boarded Destiny, that's this ship, but it's been on the move for so long that it is seriously damaged, we went along for the ride through an entire galaxy. We ran into a lot of weird stuff, like alternate realities, time loops, and crap that just made hostile aliens look like...well hostile aliens were actually a pretty big problem too."

"We had to get out of the last galaxy sooner than we wanted to. Which meant we had to go into stasis to make the trip," Eli let out a long sigh. "It was supposed to be a four year trip, but it turns out there was a wandering black hole in between galaxies. I don't know, maybe it was out of range when Destiny calculated the initial route, maybe the AI rolled the dice and lost. I don't know. We had to reroute. It tripled our time, and here we are. I can't even contact my homeworld," Eli took a communication stone out of his pocket and held it up to the orb. 

"We were using these for a while," Eli shook the stone in front of the orb. "But now it's just a paper weight."

Eli put the stone back in his pocket and continued. "I wish I could gate off this ship," Eli scratched the side of his head. "Well, I can gate off this ship, but it's so damaged that it can only reach gates in whatever galaxy it's flying through. But we can't use it to get home. We would if we could. Believe me, we would," Eli emphasized. "And I was kind of hoping that's where you could help."

"The ship is falling apart. It's so bad that everyone else is in stasis. If you could maybe help me out, send some AMRs. That's what we call those little robots that fix stuff. They kind of look like a coffee grinder with legs and flippers...but you don't know what I'm talking about," Eli took deep breath and sighed as he ran his fingers through his hair. "Look, life support is barely functional. If you don't want to come aboard and take that risk, I get it. I think I'm one good sneeze from cracking this ship in half, but if you could send some of the CO2 scrubbers. Glass tubes with metal caps, about this big," Eli motioned with his hands. 

"If you could just, toss a couple through the gate that would make my life so much easier," Eli rubbed his eyes with his palms. "I don't really know much about you guys, like as a race, but from everything I've heard you guys, you're good people. The kind of people that would help someone out, especially if they needed help with something you left behind. I need help. I need it, bad. If there's anything you can, that'd be great."

Eli stood in silence for a moment. "I don't know, maybe I'm just hallucinating all this. Maybe you're not the Ancients. Maybe you just don't care. If you get this message, if you care...move the mirror ball to the other side of the bridge."

Eli stared at the silver ball for a few more seconds before he sighed and left the bridge. He went back to his quarters, took a shower and laid in his bed. He stared at the ceiling for hours before he finally drifted off.

When Eli woke up the following day the first thing he did was reach for the remote to check the kino monitoring the orb. It was still floating over the captains chair. He let out a disappointed sigh and got dressed. This was the longest he'd stayed on this ship in months and he wanted to feel the sun on his face so Eli gated back to the world he'd come to think of as Hawaii Away From Home. 

Hunting and gathering were barely enough to keep his mind off the orb at first, but he dialed Destiny once a day and checked the kino with his remote from the planet. The orb never moved. Eli checked daily for a month until waking up before dawn one day and forgetting. 

It was still dark, and the air was cool, so Eli decided to head up into the higher plains where the tall grass gave way to the rainforest to hunt one of the grazing creatures he'd come to think of as a Deer-A-Saur. It hornlike tubes reminded him of a Stegosaurus. Eli found a natural blind behind a fallen tree looking out over a grassy plateau just before the sun broke the horizon.

He sat silent, and motionless for over an hour before he spotted the first Deer-A-Saur of the morning. Eli fired a single round and the creature twisted and fell into the grass. It quickly got back to its feet and sprinted up the plateau into the rain forest. Eli followed at a distance, trying to keep it in sight. His stomach knotted more and more as the creature just kept going.

Eli knew that he hit it, but now he was thinking he'd just wounded it. The creature continued on higher and higher. The farther it went the more he was dreading carrying it back to his camp. He tracked it into the late afternoon before losing it in the thick forest. Turning around Eli saw the ocean in the distance, and he sighed.

He stretched his hand out to lean on a tree beside him, and the bark crumbled under his hand and he slid off the trunk and fell over sideways. The ground dropped steeply and Eli began tumbling down the slope. It was littered with small saplings and stones. Eli felt like he was hitting each and every one as he tumbled and picked up speed.

He kept trying to grab something, but the only time he came close to grabbing a small tree his rifle slammed into his face and he lost his grip. He finally came to an abrupt and painful stop when he rolled sideways into a dead tree trunk. Eli screamed after he caught his breath, he was sure at least three ribs were broken. Blinking the dirt from his eyes Eli realized the dead tree was jutting out from a nearly sheer cliff that dropped sixty feet into a narrow crevice below him.

A fresh surge of adrenaline blasted through him when the dirt beneath him shifted and his legs swung out over the edge. He flailed and got his legs back onto the ground. Then he carefully pulled himself a few feet up from the edge, and that was when he saw it. 

The Deer-A-Saur laid dead several feet in front of him wedged against another tree. It's body was broken, twisted, and bloody. The creatures' dead eyes stared back at Eli and he couldn't look away. After several seconds Eli realized his eyes were tearing up. He pressed the back of his hand against one eye, and the tears began to drip down his cheeks. 

The tears became shaking sobs, and lasted for longer than Eli expected. When it was over he sat there panting, and shaking slightly before he looked up the slope he'd fallen down and began to climb back up. The walk back was slow and painful. He was bruised and bleeding all over, and it hurt to breath.

When he got back to his camp Eli dropped down beside his fire pit and started drinking from a metal thermos. The hunger that came and went on the walk back was coming on strong, but Eli was too sore to move and the sun was going down. It took all his will to stand back up and dial the gate back to the ship. He wanted a shower and to sleep off this world. 

Once again Eli wished that he was on a regular ship with a regular shower head. This just wasn't the same. He got changed and laid down in his bed. He glanced over at the remote sitting on what passed for his night stand and for the first time that day he thought about the orb. He slowly picked up the remote and checked the kino.

He rubbed the sleepiness from his eyes as the screen activated. When he saw the video he sat up and ran to the bridge. Wilson followed him through the corridors. On the bridge he saw that the orb was no longer floating above the captain's chair but was instead above the forward most console. Eli switched the remote from the kino to the orb, and checked the video. 

The remote fell from his numb hand to the steel deck as Eli stepped forward and put his hand on the orb.


End file.
